Foucault in the Context of French and German Philosophy

About this event

Welcome everyone! This meetup will last many months or possibly even years. Every effort will be made to welcome newcomers to the meetup. It should be fairly easy for newcomers to get up to speed even if they have not read all the books which will have been read by people who were with the meetup right from the start. Please feel welcome to join the meetup at any stage in its development! Foucault was many things (Historian, Cultural Critic, Activist and much more). But in this meetup we will be focusing on an aspect of Foucault which often gets overlooked. Foucault was trained in the very rigorous French Philosophy of Science tradition, he was a subtle reader of Kant and he was also a thinker who (arguably) extended a broadly Heideggerian mode of thinking in a very interesting and unique way. We will be looking at all aspects of Foucault, but we will make a special effort not to overlook Foucault's deep immersion in these more rigorous strands of philosophy. This will be a 3 hour meetup. During the first two hours we will read an original work by Foucault. We will start with "The Order of Things (https://www.routledge.com/The-Order-of-Things/Foucault/p/book/9780415267373)", we will later read "The Archaeology of Knowledge (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203604168/archaeology-knowledge-michel-foucault)" and we will also (from time to time) read some of Foucault's lectures and shorter essays. See below for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the readings. 👇 During the final hour of the meetup we will read a secondary source about Foucault or Foucault's intellectual context. See below for a list of some of the secondary source books we will dip into. The first book we will read in the final hour might seem like a strange choice: "Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France 1927-1961 (https://cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473821/generation-existential/)" by Ethan Kleinberg. This book provides a nice history of French Philosophy in the generation before Foucault with a special emphasis on the particular meaning Historicism had in France and on what historically-based philosophy in general meant in France. The connections to Foucault's historically-based type of philosophy will become apparent as we read more. As the meetup progresses I hope to do sessions where we compare and contrast Foucault with some of his contemporaries. In other words, I hope we will read works by Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Barbara Cassin, Roland Barthes and others. The goal will be to compare Foucault's project and its basic philosophical attitude with theirs. Also, as the meetup progresses, I hope to compare Foucault's project with that of the great Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking. Ian's philosophical concerns were in some ways very similar to Foucault's, although the differences are also interesting to explore. At the Collège de France, Foucault's title was "Professor of the History of Systems of Thought" (Professeur de l'histoire des systèmes de pensée). Ian Hacking held Professorships at the University of Toronto and also at Collège de France where his title was "Chair of the Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts" (Chaire de philosophie et histoire des concepts scientifiques). Even just comparing the names they chose for themselves says much about their similarities and differences. The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 12-20 pages from each of the two assigned books before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading. People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it!